Gainward Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample

Far Cry

Publisher: Ubisoft

Here, we are using the full retail version of Far Cry patched to version 1.31. We did a manual run through of a section of the Factory level, which is both indoors and outdoors - the majority of our manual run through is taken from the start of the level, which is all outdoors. We also played through a section of the Fort level to ensure that our settings were playable in other graphic-intensive environments.

It was the first game to implement a High-Dynamic Range Lighting technique, based on the OpenEXR file format, allowing all video cards with an FP16 frame buffer and support for FP16 blending to make use of this new lighting technique. At the moment, this method of HDR is only supported by NVIDIA's hardware, but we fully expect ATI's upcoming hardware to have support for FP16 blending and FP16 frame buffers.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus we left the drivers set to "Application Controlled".

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. In this title, we found that 25 to 30 frames per second minimum and a target of 45 frames per second (or higher) for the average frame rate in our manual run through. We found that this delivered a smooth and fluid gaming experience across the rest of the title, which were slightly less graphic intense than our manual run through.

The additional memory bandwidth and texture fill rate available to the Gainward GeForce 7800 GTX Golden Sample meant that we saw massive image quality increases. We were able to increase the settings by a whole resolution setting - going from 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF HDR '2' to 1600x1200 0xAA 8xAF HDR '2'. The increased resolution meant that jaggies were less of a worry and the trade off to enable HDR was more than worthwhile.

The HIS Radeon X850 XT PE delivered smooth frame rates at 1600x1200 2xAA 8xAF, while the XFX GeForce 6800 GT SLI was fine playing the game at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF with maximum in game details. We noted a while back that release 75 seems to have given Far Cry's performance the proverbial kick up the back side and we've found that it is a lot more playable at higher resolutions than it ever has been with previous driver releases.